postmaker

Drafts your Discourse notes into ready-to-review posts for site, Threads and Bluesky, straight back into the Discourse topic. You then review, edit and approve by ❤️-liking the draft — a separate publisher tool picks approved drafts up and posts them.

This repo is the drafter only.

How it works

An infinite poll loop, with Discourse as the only source of truth — nothing is stored locally:

1. Find topics tagged public (optionally restricted to a category via category in postmaker.toml) that don't yet carry all network tags.
2. For each, right after the first post, ensure a service comment exists (reserved for future stats).
3. For each network without its tag yet: generate the post with claude -p using that network's prompt, post it as a comment from its template, then set the network's tag (site / threads / bluesky) to mark the draft ready.

State is derived every pass:

• network tag present → that draft is ready (set by us when done)
• hidden comment marker (<!-- postmaker:draft:threads --> etc.) → dedup / crash-recovery between posting the comment and setting the tag

Overflowing posts are split into a numbered thread (Threads ≤ 500, Bluesky ≤ 300 chars). The site draft is long-form, unlimited.

Configure

• Secrets → environment (.env): DISCOURSE_URL, DISCOURSE_API_KEY, DISCOURSE_API_USERNAME. See .env.example.
• Structure → postmaker.toml: the networks, their limits, and each one's prompt (prompts/<net>.md) and comment template (templates/<net>.md).

Networks, prompts and templates are all config — edit them freely.

Run

cp .env.example .env    # fill in Discourse secrets (plain KEY=value)
direnv allow            # loads the flake dev shell + .env (see .envrc)
# no direnv? -> `nix develop` and `set -a; source .env; set +a`

# smoke-test generation only (no Discourse needed):
printf 'Title: Test\n\nMy note about X' | python -m postmaker gen threads

# one pass / forever:
POSTMAKER_DRY_RUN=1 python -m postmaker once   # generate + print, don't post
python -m postmaker run                         # poll forever

Or via the flake app:

nix run . -- once

Requirements: the claude CLI on PATH, already authenticated. Generation uses claude -p --model claude-opus-4-8 with the per-network prompt — no separate API key.